It’s 6:30 a.m. on a Friday in Los Angeles, and I am sitting in a house dark and silent even as the day begins to lighten, to pierce the last loose tendrils of the night. In all honesty, this feels like a metaphor for these last few months, regardless of the hour, as if I’m caught in the middle somehow, in the moment before something yields to something else. Call it hope, for want of a better word, which is a form of heresy. Call it perseverance or persistence, which are heresies of a different sort.
I do not mean that I am optimistic, just that I am trying to remain aware.
What I am saying is that in moments such as this, the ones before the world asserts or re-asserts itself, I feel most like myself. That, I suspect, has always been the case. I like edges, blurriness, the inchoate aura of anticipation. I like keeping my own company. I like the expansiveness of time that unfolds in the in-between, when whatever may be about to happen hasn’t yet begun. Late last summer, after my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I spent a few days sitting with the knowledge before I shared the news. This was not, I want to tell you, a matter of secrecy or denial; it was more the need to hold my breath.
As to why I might choose to keep that information secret, let’s just say it grew out of wanting to keep the inevitable at bay. Not that I could delay or undo it, just that it might keep its distance as long as it remained unnamed. We call things into being when we identify them. We are required to deal with them once they become known or stated in the world. Then, as now, what I wanted most was the opportunity to sit, to think and process, to grow accustomed to the weight.
That need to take a little time, not to react: it also feels like something of a heresy to me. We live (and have for many years now) in a culture defined by instantaneous communication, one where every thought or idea must be spoken, even before anything is known. It’s why I’ve found myself pulling back from social media in recent months. It’s why I have stopped checking news or messages in the evenings, to take for myself a small space of refuge. Literature is like that also—not disengaged but thoughtful, a conversation with a more expansive point of view. In that conversation, there are many voices, many visions, which means it may, at times, become as dissonant as Babel. But why not? Babel is now where we live.
This issue of Air/Light represents an attempt to create something out of that disruption. Not by capitulating but by using it to clear a space for whatever may emerge. Here, you’ll find a collection of individual perspectives—individual heresies, let’s call them—that together suggest the fabric of a larger provocation, a way of standing in the world. These voices are soft and also strident, by turns inward and outward looking, raising questions that don’t yet (may never) have answers, just a pressing urgency to be asked. This is what art affords us. This is why it remains essential, especially in an era of relentless noise. It is why I am writing in the early morning, as the dawn breaks, not as a strategy for hiding or deflecting, but rather as a gesture of resistance, a refusal to give in to the overwhelm.
